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Adaptive Robot Helper

When having a driver’s test, training for a sports event or just rehabilitating from a physical injury, have you ever wondered what it would be like if some sort of robot would assist you in a safe and versatile manner? Well, wonder no more for the researchers of the University of Sussex, Imperial College London and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore did just that.

With the use of Game theory which is used to understand how economic agents decide and interact with each other in order to maximise their own gain, and with adaptive control the researchers programmed a robot that could understand its human user’s behaviour so that it can anticipate their movement and respond to them.

Lead author Dr Yanan Li, Lecturer in Control Engineering at the University of Sussex, said: "It is still very early days in the development of robots and at present, those that are used in a working capacity are not intuitive enough to work closely and safely with human users. By enabling the robot to identify human users' behaviour and exploiting game theory to let the robot optimally react to them, we have developed a system where robots can work along humans as humans do."